Great leaders don’t deal with headcount. They deal with people. Each employee is a person with a name and a face, with wants, needs, and dreams. They are each an individual whose life is impacted for the better or the worse by working for their company. These leaders choose to make it for the better.

Welcome to the fourth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please subscribe at the right side of the page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It is my desire to help you live your Catholic faith in the marketplace and to trust that it is good for business. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we will reflect on the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter and the application to your work life.

In this week’s Gospel, Jesus claims the title of the Good Shepherd. He contrasts a good shepherd to the hired man who works only for pay. The lessons for leadership are endless.

Have you ever worked for someone whom you’d have done anything for? Maybe it was a coach or a mentor. I’ve been fortunate to have had a few of these people in my life. I wish I could say I was that type of leader.

Looking back and thinking about what it was about these people that created such a sense of loyalty from me and other team members, I think it was because it wasn’t about them. A good shepherd knows that it is all about the sheep. The Good Shepherd goes so far as to lay down his life for his sheep.

I’ve also worked for a few people whose leadership style did not compel me to be the best I could be. In fact, they tended to smother my initiative. Perhaps you’ve had this experience too. It was like working for, as the Gospel says, a hired man:

A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them. This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.  John 10:12-13

I worked for a small division of a large Fortune 500 telecommunications company that was used as a training ground for up and coming corporate leaders. We had a revolving door of presidents whose only goal was to work there for a year or two, and then move up to their next level within the company. At least, that is how it appeared to us. Short-term bottom line profits were the only results that mattered. (Not all of these temp-CEOs operated this way, but many of them did.)

I remember a story about an executive leadership meeting where the budget for technical training was being discussed. Now we were a technology company and the technology was evolving constantly. If we didn’t stay ahead of the curve, we would have been out of business. So, when the plea for investment in employee training and development was debated, this strategic imperative should have been obvious. However, as the story goes, an argument against the investment was made by asking, “What if we invest in training our people and they leave?”

This was sad because this business unit had an enormously talented and creative team of people who accomplished great things with limited investment. I can only imagine how their efforts would have been multiplied if they were not only allowed to develop their skills and talents but encouraged and supported to do so.

This example highlights the qualities of the “hired man.” As a leader, he operates out of fear and not of fear for his team, but fear for himself. For the hired man, it is all about him (or her.)

There was one leader in the room when the training budget was being discussed who voiced an opposite view. He said, “What happens if we don’t invest in training for our employees and they stay?” A few weeks ago, on the Easter Sunday reflection, I talked about the lesson of “turning the other cheek.” In his wisdom, the second leader challenged the small-mindedness of the fearful leader and used his own tactics against him. He turned the tables and wisdom prevailed. As Richard Branson once tweeted:

How do we do that? How do we create an environment where people are treated so well that they never want to leave?

When researching companies for his book Good to Great, Jim Collins discovered that all the great organizations that he studied were headed by what he called “Level 5 Leaders.” These Level 5 Leaders are people who have a unique combination of fierce resolve and humility.

Note, Level 5 “great leaders” from Collins’ research are humble – that is they know that success is not about them, and they surround themselves with the right people who have skills they don’t have so that the organization can succeed. They also point everyone in the direction of success with fierce resolve and intense professional will.

They know their vision, they share their vision, they pursue their vision, and they know they cannot achieve the vision, if not for the talents of others in their organization. They appreciate—really appreciate—each person and their contribution to the accomplishment of the organization’s goals. They lead with humility and fierce resolve.

But there is more to being a good shepherd than vision and humility, or is there?

I like to watch TED Talks as one of my continuous personal development practices and Simon Sinek is one of my favorite TED speakers. Recently, I went back and watched one of his talks that I’ve watched many times before. It is called “Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe.”

I encourage you to watch it in its entirety because what he is describing and each of his examples of good leaders are modern day examples of good shepherds.

In this TED Talk, Simon Sinek describes the heroic actions of a military leader who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and then the comments, “In the military, they give medals to people who sacrifice themselves, so others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others, so that they may gain.”

But that isn’t the way it has to be, nor is it the way truly great leaders operate.

Simon Sinek goes on to share multiple scenarios of exceptional leaders like Charlie Kim at Next Jump, a tech company in New York, or Bob Chapman CEO, of Barry-Wehmiller, a manufacturing company in the Midwest. Both these men, are great leaders, and according to Sinek, “Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers, they would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.”

This sounds like a great philosophy until you are responsible for making sure there is enough money in the bank to cover payroll. How can these leaders run profitable companies? The answer is not intuitive, at least not from a fear-based, “hired man” perspective. Great leaders do not have a lack of concern for the bottom line. However, they have their priorities in the right order.

About 10 years ago, I attended a seminar where Al Weiss, former president of worldwide operation for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, spoke. He shared a story from 2001 when he was the president of the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. As I remember the talk, he spoke about how for the first time in the resort’s history, they closed the parks on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to open again the next morning for about 40% of the guests, and they knew they were in trouble. After a couple weeks of significantly lower revenues, the leadership team looked for solutions and the obvious one was to layoff their cast members. When the call came from Disney headquarters in Burbank, CA, and they were asked how they were going to meet their year-end profit goals, Weiss responded that they were looking at alternative strategies including massive layoffs. The response was “Do what you have to do, just deliver the bottom line results.”

But Al Weiss just couldn’t dump all those people into the Orlando market without a job and hope they would survive. So, he instructed this leadership team to look for other solutions. For three weeks they studied their operations, looked inside and out, up and down, learned a great deal about nitty gritty of how it ran and they came up with an alternative to deliver the profits and keep the employees.  Then, 2 months later when the volume of tourists in Orlando returned to normal, Walt Disney World Resorts didn’t have to hire and train new cast members. They were able to manage through the crisis and deliver the results. Al Weiss could have easily lost his job over his decision, however, three years later, he was promoted.

But people like Al Weiss and Charlie Kim and Bob Chapman don’t do it out of concern for themselves. They are successful because they care about other people. They are the good shepherds who care about their sheep.

Why do they care? Because they know them. They don’t deal with headcount. They deal with people. Each employee is a person with a name and a face, with wants, needs, and dreams. They are each an individual whose life is impacted for the better or the worse by working for their company. These leaders choose to make it for the better.

I was working with the CEO of a family-owned business, and when we started working together, he acknowledged that he had lost his zeal for the business. He lamented that the personal profitability gains from the company’s success that once drove him, didn’t mean anything anymore. He didn’t need a bigger house, another boat or a more expensive car. Through the coaching process, he discovered that his company’s purpose was not found in his paycheck, rather it was to provide an opportunity for the 80+ people who worked there. He realized that his purpose was to provide opportunities that would better the lives of his employees.

Another CEO had a similar transforming realization when he discovered that his employees aren’t there to achieve the company’s goals, instead, his company was there to help his employees achieve their goals.

I’ve found, just as Simon Sinek found, that these great leaders have a team of happy, loyal employees who consistently go above and beyond to serve their customers and each other.

In “Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe”, Simon Sinek kept asking the question “Why? Why do people do this? Why do people give their blood, sweat, and tears to see that their leader’s vision comes to life?” When he asked them “Why?”, their response was “Because he would have done it for me.”

My question is, why would these leaders have done it for them? What is at the core of their being that gets them to care so much about their people first?

A friend of mine recently told me that “making personal decisions based on the greater good vs. your own self-interests is always the way to go. In the end, it makes life much more rewarding and somehow easier. A focus on money, without meaning, is an empty glass.”

It is more rewarding, and it is easier, but it is also a constant struggle to live this out in our lives.

“I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep. This command I have received from my Father.” John 10:14-15, 18

And, this is the command we have received from our Father as well. This is also the example we received from Jesus. He would do it for us…He already did do it for us.

What about you? Are you driven by what is in your best interest or by what is best for others? Let us ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen us when we struggle each day with challenges and fears and to help us to lead as good shepherds.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth. 

May God bless you abundantly with the grace to put others first so that you may glorify him by your life.  Amen

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Many thanks to Fr. Stan Fortuna for his musical gifts, especially the traditional and contemporary versions of Come Holy Ghost (Come Holy Spirit) that you hear in this podcast. You can find more from Fr. Stan at http://www.francescoproductions.com/ or on Facebook.